The growing presence of the Internet as well as other computer networks such as intranets and extranets has brought many new applications in e-commerce and other areas. Organizations increasingly rely on such applications to carry out their business or other objectives, and devote considerable resources to ensuring that the applications perform as expected. To this end, various application management techniques have been developed.
Application management techniques have included monitoring of applications. Some prior systems monitor transactions from a client which requests services provided by the application. Though monitoring an application from a client does not provide additional load for a server, it may not provide an accurate indication of the performance of the application or server. For example, when monitoring the length of a transaction from a client, it is difficult to determine whether transaction delays are due to the server processing the transaction or the network over which client-server communications are transmitted.